4 ms·

Look at refurbished Macbook Airs at the Apple Web site. I'm not a developer, but I'm writing a long book using Emacs and LaTex, so the cycle of write text, comp

by dctoedt 13y ago

Look at refurbished Macbook Airs at the Apple Web site. I'm not a developer, but I'm writing a long book using Emacs and LaTex, so the cycle of write text, compile the file(s), review for errors, and edit the file(s) is somewhat similar. I'd always been a Wintel user, but in January I bought a refurbished 11-inch Macbook Air with a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. I love it. I don't even use an external monitor, keyboard, or mouse anymore.

tptacek 13y ago
You're writing a book in LaTex?!
- dfc 13y ago
  Why is that so hard to understand? If it is a math text it seems like a nobrainer. If I was going to write a book (by definition not a math text) I would write it in pandoc and then use pandoc to create the latex. Using the memoir style it would be easy to create a print ready book with all the bells and whistles and then send the pdf to a self publishing/printing outfit.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    D.C. Toedt's book is probably not a math book, is why I asked.
- dctoedt 13y ago
  > You're writing a book in LaTex?! Yep. It's a long contracts-related book with lots of internal cross-references. MS Word seemed to keep corrupting things, so I went back to my Emacs and Scribe roots. It's all much easier with LaTex and Emacs org-mode, plus the resulting PDF files are very nice. (I wrote my first book in 1980-81 using Emacs and Scribe on a TOPS-20 system. It was a "for Dummies"-type user guide for my fellow law-review editors on, wait for it, how to use Emacs and Scribe on a TOPS-20 system to produce and edit law-review articles. My second book, on software law, was done in 1986-87 with The Final Word, which was a clone of Emacs and Scribe.)
  - dfc 13y ago
    How do you handle case citations in latex? I never found a easy way to do legal citations in latex that came anywhere close to bluebook format.
    - dctoedt 13y ago
      > How do you handle case citations in latex? Brute force. I don't even try to use BibTex. I just find the opinion on-line somewhere (Google Scholar if possible, failing that Justia.com or one of the opinion publishers). I make the case name a hyperlink to the on-line opinion. Then in plain, non-linked text I include whatever Blue Book style I can, preferably to the West reporter series if available, failing which the slip-opinion cite. I also include a shortened URL, so that anyone reading a hard copy can type it in.

by dctoedt 13y ago

tptacek 13y ago

You're writing a book in LaTex?!

dfc 13y ago
Why is that so hard to understand? If it is a math text it seems like a nobrainer. If I was going to write a book (by definition not a math text) I would write it in pandoc and then use pandoc to create the latex. Using the memoir style it would be easy to create a print ready book with all the bells and whistles and then send the pdf to a self publishing/printing outfit.
- tptacek 13y ago
  D.C. Toedt's book is probably not a math book, is why I asked.
dctoedt 13y ago
> You're writing a book in LaTex?! Yep. It's a long contracts-related book with lots of internal cross-references. MS Word seemed to keep corrupting things, so I went back to my Emacs and Scribe roots. It's all much easier with LaTex and Emacs org-mode, plus the resulting PDF files are very nice. (I wrote my first book in 1980-81 using Emacs and Scribe on a TOPS-20 system. It was a "for Dummies"-type user guide for my fellow law-review editors on, wait for it, how to use Emacs and Scribe on a TOPS-20 system to produce and edit law-review articles. My second book, on software law, was done in 1986-87 with The Final Word, which was a clone of Emacs and Scribe.)
- dfc 13y ago
  How do you handle case citations in latex? I never found a easy way to do legal citations in latex that came anywhere close to bluebook format.
  - dctoedt 13y ago
    > How do you handle case citations in latex? Brute force. I don't even try to use BibTex. I just find the opinion on-line somewhere (Google Scholar if possible, failing that Justia.com or one of the opinion publishers). I make the case name a hyperlink to the on-line opinion. Then in plain, non-linked text I include whatever Blue Book style I can, preferably to the West reporter series if available, failing which the slip-opinion cite. I also include a shortened URL, so that anyone reading a hard copy can type it in.